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Dr David Roberts
Image copyright David Roberts 2015, all rights reserved
Probably everyone’s experienced at some time ‘Death by PowerPoint’: a presentation that, rather than engaging your attention, makes you want to run away. Slides packed full of bullet points ‘organizing’ text that appears as a wall of words, and to add insult to injury, the speaker is often duplicating the text. PowerPoint has become a source of ridicule, with Google’s former Research Director, Peter Norvig, declaring it to be more dangerous that a loaded AK47, because it harms more people.
Image copyright David Roberts 2015, all rights reserved
He isn’t alone: a distinguished Professor Emeritus famously declared that ‘power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely’. But behind the satire there’s a serious point: according to recent and ongoing Multimedia Learning (MML) scholarship, we’re pedagogically problematic in at least two ways: we’re overloading lecture slides with text and we’re not using images effectively, if at all. Most of us probably recognize the first issue, but the second is paramount. We seem to have forgotten that a picture paints a thousand words, and that images help us see what people mean. They can be of inestimable value in teaching social sciences.
Image copyright David Roberts 2015, all rights reserved
We live in a visual era. Hundreds of millions of images are daily uploaded to the web through an ever-expanding range of visual platforms. People get knowledge and understanding from images long before coming to University. They communicate with images from very early childhood; babies learn from seeing before reading. This generation of students expects imagery when they enter Higher Education. Marc Prensky calls this generation ‘digital natives’, representative of a visual turn enabled by digital photography and dissemination across the Internet. Tietje and Cresap argue that academia is ‘marketed overwhelmingly to… young adults [for whom] visual media dominate’ (2005), and that was 10 years ago. But we’re still eccentrically text-centric, digitally dated and pedagogically pauce. Fortunately, it doesn’t take a great deal to transform how we use PowerPoint; indeed, it is almost perfectly suited for substantially improved large group lecturing. We know this from Multimedia Learning (MML) research.
MML, defined as ‘building mental representations from words and pictures’ (Mayer, 2014, p. 2), revolves around the idea that ‘people can learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone’ (2014, p. 1). This MML research tells us to balance the flow: images for eyes, words for ears. It often instinctively feels right.
Image copyright David Roberts 2015 all rights reserved
It doesn’t mean doing away with text. It means not overloading ears and under-utilizing eyes. We can keep as much text as we want in the ‘notes’ view, which students will access via the slides uploaded to their Visual Learning Platform. As a general rule, we should use tex